Do you feel constantly bombarded with conflicting stories about what is or isn’t good for you? Well you are not alone. Two thirds of us are confused about which food and drinks are considered to be ‘healthy’ according to new research.

Red wine, tea, eggs, dairy products: are they good for you or bad? One week they are said to be good for us, the next they aren’t? Well 84% of us recall reading conflicting stories making claims for and against certain food and drinks.

We all want to know what the key is to a longer, healthier life and reducing the risks of major illnesses such as heart disease, while still enjoying what we eat and drink.

Dr Carrie Ruxton is the author of a comprehensive medical review published in this month’s British Food Journal that for the first time proves one food in particular can reduce cholesterol, one of the main causes of heart disease.

And now, Dr Ruxton is hosting an exclusive webchat in which she’ll be offering information and advice on how this inexpensive and accessible foodstuff can help you help your heart.

She will also be answering all your questions about diet and heart health, so hit the link below for the complete picture.

H: Host, Jayne Constantinis
C: Dr Carrie Ruxton, nutritionist

H: Hello and welcome to the Healthcare Show, I’m Jayne Constantinis. Now, like me you’re probably sick of being bombarded with healthy food messages.  You might even, like me be a bit confused about labels such as Superfood.  Well on today’s show we’re going to sort out the fact from the fiction, and to help us do that is nutritionist Dr Carrie Ruxton.  Carrie thanks very much for coming in to talk to us.  And of course we’re live, so if you’ve got a question for Carrie then type it in the box on the screen, send it to us with your name of course and we’ll get through as many as we can during the course of the show. So Carrie there is a lot of confusion isn’t there, but slightly less as of today and the report that you’ve just published about oats and cholesterol. Tell us about that?

C: Absolutely.  Well today in the British Food Journal we published a report looking at regular oat consumption and blood cholesterol levels, and what I did was I gathered together 21 studies of the highest possible quality of evidence, all human intervention studies where people have been given oats and followed up over a period of time.  And what the majority of these studies showed was that regular consumption of oats was linked to lower cholesterol levels, particularly the bad LDL cholesterol which is linked to heart disease risk

H: You obviously had an inkling that that was going to be the finding.  What was it that alerted you to that possibility?

C: Well I have seen individual studies saying you know we gave 20 people oats for 6 weeks and cholesterol went down, and then you just keep coming across these and you think to yourself well if you pull them all together in one report we’d find consistent evidence, so I did have this inkling that we would find it, and right enough when I pulled it all together that’s what we found, and it really was quite amazing the range of reduction, it even went up to maybe 17 / 20% reduction in total cholesterol in some of the people taking part in the surveys, and it seemed that people who had the high cholesterol levels to begin with benefited the most as well, so there’s some really interesting messages there for people

H: So let’s just go back a step if you wouldn’t mind and just talk about cholesterol

C: Yes

H: What it is and why it’s so bad for us?

C: Yes well cholesterol is a type of fat in our blood, and we do need it because we use it almost as internal lubrication and it protects our cells from damage, but the trouble is when you have too much of a certain type of cholesterol called LDL cholesterol, and these are very tiny pieces of cholesterol, very small dents, particles that whizz around the body and they get lodged in our artery walls, and when these amounts of cholesterol build up in the artery walls they cause it to bulge, which then narrows, and then if you’ve also got other risk factors such as high blood pressure, you’ve got blood that clots very easily, you can have the circumstance, if you imagine standing on a hose and narrowing it, you can easily get things blocked in it, and that’s effectively what a heart attack is, when the arteries supplying our heart get narrowed, they get blocked by blood clots, and that causes a heart attack.  So if you kind of take that back a few steps and say I’m healthy now, how do I prevent heart disease from happening, we try and obviously keep our blood pressure normal, we try not to have too high cholesterol levels in the blood and we try not to have this sluggish, easily clotting blood, and there’s various things we can do about that that involve our diets

H: So it’s principally about heart disease?

C: Yes, absolutely – cholesterol is really all about preventing heart disease

H: Ok.  Now the $6 billion question – how do oats reduce cholesterol?

C: Well it’s important to point out there isn’t any one food that can definitely reduce your risk of a heart attack.  What we’ve got to do is put it in the context of a heart healthy diet, and what oats do that’s very special is – I don’t know if you’ve ever made porridge oats and left them to sit, and they kind of set like a jelly

H: Yes, yes

C: Well what makes oats set is something called betaglucens which is a soluble fibre that is naturally contained in oats, and when we eat the betaglucens in oats it grabs onto cholesterol in our gut and flushes it out the other side, so we are simply not taking in so much cholesterol from our diet into the blood and that helps us to control the blood levels of cholesterol. 

H: I think you’ve already said this but it’s good for people who’ve already got high cholesterol, but also from a preventative point of view

C: Absolutely, I mean it seems to do both, that if you were trying to prevent heart disease, eating a heart health diet, that contains oats, is a good way to go about it.  If you already have a risk factor such as high blood cholesterol levels, that’s anything over about 5, 5 ½ mls per litre, people who’ve been to the doctor will know their number.  If you’ve got this high cholesterol then oats can help to reduce it

H: How do you know if you’ve got high cholesterol or that you might have it?

C: Yes well I’ve seen in surveys that only about one in ten people knows their number, because if you go to the States a lot more people do know ,but I wouldn’t like people to all rush off at once to their doctors and certainly the doctors would not thank me at all, but if listeners are concerned about their cholesterol level for any reason, maybe they’ve got a relative whose got heart disease or they’re a bit overweight, they smoke, they’re worried about their heart health, then if they make an appointment with their doctor or practice nurse, they can have a very simple test which can measure their cholesterol level

H: And people who are overweight are more likely to have it or – does it not matter what sort of weight you are?

C: Well if you are overweight and have a risk of heart disease in your family you’re more likely to have a high cholesterol level, but I have seen patients in the past who have a high cholesterol level and they weren’t overweight at all

H: Right, so you mustn’t think you’re immune just because you’re –

C: Absolutely

H: Ok, let’s – we’ve got lots of questions coming in

C: Ok

H: And we’ve got lots of more general issues that I want to ask you, but let’s take our first question from Keith who says he’s so used to grabbing a sandwich from the sandwich man at work – that sounds familiar doesn’t it?  With a packet of crisps.  Are there any oat-based snacks out there?

C: Well there’s certainly cereal bars that contain oats and things like flapjacks, although I would go for the ones that are lower in fat because some flapjacks are loaded with butter, and that’s not so good, but there are cereal bars which are a bit healthier than others, perhaps ones that also contain fruit, and that makes them healthier.  But if he goes and grabs a sandwich why doesn’t he save a bit of money and make his own sandwich at home using oat bread, because you get bread nowadays that’s part wheat flour and part oat flour, so two slices of that would give you half of your daily recommended intake of oats

H: I think that might be a step too far for him!  Let’s start him off on a cereal bar.  Let’s just then think about how much you need to have in your day for it to really be effective.  I know you said it’s got to be part of a balanced diet and

C: Absolutely

H: But how many oats do we need in a day?

C: Well the magic number of betaglucen is 3g a day, and translating that into real food, what we’re talking about is a bowl of porridge would be about half that amount, then you could have two slices of oat bread, and that would be your 3.  Or you’d have – there’s a lot of ready to eat breakfast cereals such as Oatibix around which means that you don’t have to go and make porridge in the morning, so you could have one portion of those and add that to a cereal bar in the afternoon, so there’s various ways of doing it and we’ve got some products here that contain oats, cereal bars as well.  So there are more and more products nowadays that are using either oat flour or whole rolled oats – muesli, things like that, so there’s a lot of things around that we used to have that we didn’t used to have in the past when literally you just had to make a bowl of porridge, or if you didn’t like that, too bad

H: Sure.  And a lot of people make their own muesli

C: Yes

H: So you can up the percentage of oats in it, can’t you?

C: Yes absolutely.  You can also make what I call Birches muesli where you get porridge oats, stick in some yogurt, add in some berries, some crushed nuts and some dried coconut, and you stick it in the fridge overnight and it all absorbs the yogurt and you end up with this lovely rich muesli the next morning – very – if you use low fat yogurt it’s very low in fat, high in calcium, so it’s a good thing to have, and because you make it the night before you’re saving time in the morning

H: Ah yes.  I was going to ask you if there’s any difference in the effectiveness of the oats if they’re cooked or if they’re not?

C: No, there isn’t

H: It’s the same?

C: Just the same

H: Ok.  I also wanted to ask you about children and Sylvia has come in with a question along those lines, she wants to know if she should be feeding her young children oat-based breakfast, like you’ve just said, Oatibix?

C: Yes well if her children are fully weaned, so if you’re talking about children who are of a healthy weight, over the age of two, then I would say that oats would do them no harm whatsoever.  Obviously at that age you’re not thinking about cholesterol benefits, but there are other benefits to oats – they contain B vitamins, they’re a source of fibre and young children quite often have constipation because it’s not that easy to get fibre into young children so having a bowl of porridge or some oat cereal is a good way of giving them that fibre boost

H: Ok so cholesterol not an issue for young children.  At what age should we start thinking about whether or not they might have a problem?

H: Well I think it’s never too soon to have a healthy diet and I don’t think the primary reason we eat is for medical or health reasons, we eat because we enjoy it and because it makes us feel good, so if you can get children onto healthy eating as soon as possible then that’s a good thing.  Unfortunately there’s also been some studies done in adolescents showing that some of them do have high cholesterol, perhaps because of a family link, you know genetic link, and there certainly are increasing levels of type 2 diabetes in adolescents, probably linked to obesity, so I don’t think we should assume that you know we can just eat anything we want until we get to adulthood, and only then will we start eating healthily, it’s really good if we can get children and young people eating healthily right from the start, and then you’re putting habits in place that they can stick to for the rest of their lives

H: Yes I was going to say it’s exactly that isn’t it, it’s establishing patterns.  I now sit with my 4 year old and we have our bowl of porridge together

C: Yes

H: Every morning, and she eats it much more readily and much quicker because I’m also having it,

C: Yes that’s right

H: And it’s good for me too.  I didn’t realise how good until I met you today!  Sean has made a comment, echoing what I said at the beginning of the show – it’s a minefield out there knowing exactly what you should be eating.  He always thought fruit was the way forward.

C: Well fruit is extremely important but for a slightly different reason, and here on the table we’ve got lovely berries and berries, particularly the really colourful ones contain something called polyphenyls, and other types of antioxidants which also help heart health, so we’re looking at it from a different angle, so we’ve got oats helping from a cholesterol reduction side, and you’ve got fruits and berries and seasonal fruits and vegetables as well helping from the antioxidant side, where they protect ourselves from damage

H: Ok.  Liz has actually brought up something we discussed earlier.  She knows – I know I have high levels of cholesterol – she thinks tester kits are available in the high street, or does she need to go to the GP?  I think I’ve heard of these tester kits too

C: Yes, I think the kits are good for just giving you a very rough idea about what range that you’re in, but they won’t give you a specific number, you have to go and basically take a pin prick of blood, put it on the kit and check the colour against a chart, so it only gives you a range, it doesn’t give you an exact number, so if she is worried about her cholesterol and thinks it may be high, the best thing to do is for her to go and see the nurse of GP

H: Because then of course if you take steps to try and lower it, you’ll have a better gauge won’t you –

C: Yes

H: As to what you’re doing is being effective or not

C: And also your GP can measure blood pressure and other things at the same time

H: Good to have a bit of an all over check isn’t it?

C: Absolutely

H: Now Sarah just wants a clarification, we talked about what is a good portion, or a daily portion

C: Yes

H: Can you just reiterate for us how much we should try to be eating a day?

C: Yes, absolutely.  So if you had an oat breakfast cereal which can be either one of the ready-to-eat ones here or porridge oats, and you get instant oats too, that counts as almost half a portion, then the rest of the day you can aim to have a cereal bar, or bread containing oat flour, so that could be your other half, so you eat it in two halves, because you would really have to eat quite an enormous bowl of porridge to get everything

H: Right

C: I mean some people do, I mean my husband can get through porridge like nobody’s business, but some people don’t want to eat that amount of porridge in the morning, so if you’re just going to eat the usual serving of about you know 35 / 40g of porridge made up with milk, that counts as half a portion, you’d need to eat something else later on

H: Ok.  I think your husband eats that much because it’s the whisky he puts in it isn’t? It’s the bottle of whisky!

C: I’ll have to tell him off

H: Does he have salt on his?

C: No he doesn’t have anything on it at all

H: Is he a Scot?

C: No he’s English, but yes he has porridge but just with milk

H: No?

C: No sugar, no salt

H: No – and butter, that’s the other one I can’t –

C: I take my hat off  - no he doesn’t take that either

H: I can’t get my head around that either

C: No

H: Course the thing we haven’t talked about yet, and I can’t believe it, is that it’s such an inexpensive –

C: Absolutely

H: Great, healthy food

C: Yes, yes.  I mean I just think that’s fantastic, and that’s what I’m hoping my report’s going to do.  Really stimulate people to open up that cupboard and find the porridge oats or whatever they have in their cupboard there – we always hear nowadays that health foods are so expensive and people do worry that they have to spend a lot to eat healthily.  This is not the case.  Oat products are pretty cheap in the face of things, and if you combine it with the other things I mentioned in the heart health diet, seasonal fruits and veg.  Go down your local market and pick up the knobbly bobbly apples and potatoes that are sitting there waiting to be bought and are a lot less expensive than the ones you might buy in the supermarket, and oily fish once a week, and there you’ve got the perfect recipe for a heart health diet.  Does not have to cost the earth

H: And of course you can store them as well

C: Yes

H: They’re not going to – it’s not like some of those very expensive things you were talking about

C: Yes that just go off, these are things that you can put in the cupboard

H: Yes fantastic.  It’s been very, very interesting chatting and thank you for giving us so much –

C: That’s ok

H: Detailed scientific information which I’m sure we’ve all forgotten about it!

C: Just remember oats / cholesterol – that’s all you need

H: Just remember oats and cholesterol – it’s – what’s lovely about it as well, it’s kind of that back to basics, it’s like my granny used to make things with oats, and it’s nice to think they were right, and they were doing it even though they didn’t know the science behind it, isn’t it?

C: Yes, absolutely

H: Anyway, great – thank you very much

C: That’s alright

H: It’s been very interesting.  If you want more information about the report that’s just come out then go to the website which is Weetabix.co.uk, thanks very much for watching, see you again soon. Bye bye